The Memory Chalet - By Tony Judt Page 0,3

too, but I have never chanced upon it.

At the time of writing (May 2010) I have completed since the onset of my disease a small political book, a public lecture, some twenty feuilletons reflecting on my life, and a considerable body of interviews directed towards a full-scale study of the twentieth century. All of these rest on little more than nocturnal visits to my memory chalet and subsequent efforts to recapture in sequence and in detail the content of those visits. Some look inward—beginning with a house or a bus or a man; others look out, spanning decades of political observation and engagement and continents of travel, teaching, and commentary.

To be sure, there have been nights when I have sat, comfortably enough, across from Rachel Roberts or just an empty space: people and places have wandered in only to wander out again. On such unproductive occasions I don’t linger very long. I retreat to the old wooden front door, step through it onto the mountainside of the Bernese Oberland—bending geography to the will of childish association—and sit, somewhat grumpily, on a bench. Here, transformed from Rachel Roberts’s guiltily entranced little auditor into Heidi’s introverted alm-uncle, I pass the hours from wakeful sleep through somnolent consciousness—before awakening to the irritated awareness that I have managed to create, store, and recall precisely nothing from my previous night’s efforts.

Underproductive nights are almost physically frustrating. To be sure, you can say to yourself, come now: you should be proud of the fact that you have kept your sanity—where is it written that you should be productive in addition? And yet, I feel a certain guilt at having submitted to fate so readily. Who could do any better in the circumstances? The answer, of course, is “a better me” and it is surprising how often we ask that we be a better version of our present self—in the full knowledge of just how difficult it was getting this far.

I don’t resent this particular trick that conscience plays on us. But it opens up the night to the risks of the dark side; these should not be underestimated. The alm-uncle, glowering from beneath his furrowed brow at all comers, is not a happy man: his gloom only occasionally dispersed by nights spent stocking closets and drawers, shelves and corridors with the byproducts of retrieved memory.

Note that the alm-uncle, my perennially dissatisfied alter ego, does not just sit at the door of a chalet frustrated of purpose. He sits there smoking a Gitanes, cradling a glass of whisky, turning the pages of a newspaper, stomping idly across the snow-strewn streets, whistling nostalgically—and generally comporting himself as a free man. There are nights when this is all he can manage. An embittered reminder of loss? Or just the consolation of the remembered cigarette.

But other nights I walk right past him: everything works. The faces return, the examples fit, the sepia photographs come back to life, “all connects” and within a few minutes I have my story, my characters, illustrations, and morale. The alm-uncle and his dyspeptic reminders of the world I have lost weigh as nothing: the past surrounds me and I have what I need.

But which past? The little histories that take shape in my head as I lie sheathed in nocturnal gloom are unlike anything I have written before. Even by the ultra-rational demands of my profession I was always a “reasoner”: of all the clichés about “History,” the one that most appealed to me was the assertion that we are but philosophers teaching with examples. I still believe this is true, though I now find myself doing it by a distinctly indirect route.

In earlier days I might have envisaged myself as a literary Gepetto, building little Pinocchios of assertion and evidence, given life by the plausibility of their logical construction and telling the truth by virtue of the necessary honesty of their separate parts. But my latest writings have a far more inductive quality to them. Their value rests on an essentially impressionistic effect: the success with which I have related and interwoven the private and the public, the reasoned and the intuited, the recalled and the felt.

I don’t know what sort of a genre this is. Certainly the resulting little wooden boys seem to me both more loosely articulated and yet more fully human than their deductively constructed, rigorously predesigned forebears. In more polemical form—“Austerity,” perhaps—they seem to me unintentionally to recall the long-forgotten feuilletons of Karl Kraus’s Vienna: allusive, suggestive, almost too light